as a man thinketh

News Corp’s Facebook Scare Campaign

This morning I ran a quick experiment. I searched through News.com.au’s site for stories that mention Facebook in the title to see what percentage of those stories had a negative slant. My theory is that large media companies such as News are scared about the amount of traffic Facebook is getting, as it’s decreasing their own readership thereby affecting the revenue they can generate from advertising. So they are running Facebook scare campaigns.

News Corp, of course, has even more reason that other media companies to be hatin’ on the Facebook, because they own MySpace, Facebook’s biggest competitor.

5 thoughts on “News Corp’s Facebook Scare Campaign”

Cameron I’d be interested in the ratio of negative to positive stories regardless of Facebook as a headline. And if you search beyond the headline, it seems to be a popular source for images and commentary in many other stories as well. The death knock has been replaced by the Facebook stalk, voxpops on the street are replaced by tweets and I’m sure the “shared most on Facebook/Twitter” lists on various sites is regularly trawled for an idea of what will become the top news stories. No doubt that News launch not so thinly veiled attacks on anything they see as a threat, but I don’t think Facebook will become their public enemy number one anytime soon

It certainly does, so what’s changed, they’ve always shown bias, and so does every other large conglomerate media organization… I guess the main thing here is that we have Cameron Reilly… making sure this information is not overlooked! Cheers CR… keep up the great work!

Mandi, good point about the general negative/positive ratio. I do think, though, that Facebook is attracting a certain amount of attacks, now that it is the #1 internet destination in the USA and soon to be #1 around the world.